The Last Place Read online

  Or Tess could start at the beginning and work forward, make her mistakes—and she was resigned to making mistakes, they were part of the process—on the cases that were least likely to yield results. That held even less appeal.

  She wished she had real case files, not just these sad little folders of newspaper clippings and crude computer printouts, assembled by what was clearly an amateur researcher. Ah, well, these boards had to rely on volunteers. Tess had been spoiled in recent years, getting contraband copies of files through her source in Baltimore PD. She could go to the state medical examiner’s office, where all five cases would have been autopsied, and get those reports. But cause of death was not an issue here. The point was to make sure that each case had been investigated properly, that these homicides did not remain open because of raging incompetence or a police department’s myopia about domestic violence.

  Three of the victims, all young women in their twenties, were gunshot victims—two in the chest, one in the head. The fourth woman, whose DOB placed her age at forty-eight at the time of her death, had died in a suspicious fire. The man had been struck by a car while jogging, but it wasn’t clear if the case was a hit-and-run or merely an accident. Funny, she had the most information on him, because he was a prominent doctor on the faculty at Johns Hopkins, and his death had prompted lengthy obituaries in the Beacon-Light and the Washington papers. Even The New York Times had taken note of his passing.

  But the women had died quietly, or as quietly as victims of violence ever die. They had generated a few stories in their hometown papers and the kind of obituaries that funeral homes pay for, one line at a time. Among these death notices, the only detail that caught Tess’s eye was from the older woman’s, who had not a single survivor listed to her credit, not even the generic “host of friends and relatives.” The funeral home had asked that donations be sent to the Chesapeake Bay Trust in lieu of flowers. The youngest victim, and the most recent, didn’t even have an obit. All Tess had for her was a typewritten piece of paper providing her name, address, date of birth, and the cause of death. She was the one who had been shot in the head.

  Tess scribbled town names on the five thin folders and placed them around her, as if she were Baltimore and the bare wooden floor of her office was Maryland. The state was much wider than it was tall. It was typical of her luck that the cases, once arranged, made a ragged line from west to east.

  The oldest case was 60 miles to the west, on the outskirts of Frederick; that was gunshot victim number one, Tiffani Gunts. A little less farther west was the arson, in Sharpsburg, a town on the Potomac River. Hazel Ligetti. Then came the young woman with the skimpiest file, in the far northwestern reaches of Baltimore County, near Pretty-boy Reservoir. Julie Carter. That case had happened just this year, but Tess didn’t recall it. She supposed she should be shocked that a local woman could get shot to death and not make the newspaper, but she was inured by now to the Beacon-Light’s failings.

  The line shot up abruptly from there, a long diagonal, almost all the way to Delaware and the headwaters of the bay. This woman had died in a town where a singular lack of imagination must have overcome its founders, for it was known merely as North East. The victim’s parents had suffered no such lack; they had named their daughter Lucy Carmengia Fancher. Impossible to tell from the short newspaper articles about her death whether it was Carmenjia or a mangling of the old VW convertible, Karmann Ghia.

  Finally, there was the male doctor, Michael Shaw, killed on Route 100, an east-west highway between Baltimore and Annapolis. It was the nearest case by far, and the most recent, only five months old. It also was the least interesting.

  One thing was clear: The board was going to owe her dearly for mileage. No matter how she plotted her course across the state, her old Toyota would rack up a lot of miles.

  “So what do you think, Esskay?”

  Tess often consulted her greyhound as if the dog were a Magic 8-Ball of sorts. Esskay raised her head, miffed at being disturbed, snorted, and dropped her head with a heavy thunk that give the impression that it might be hollow. Tess interpreted this look as “Outlook unclear.”

  “What about you, Miata?” The other dog in her life, as accidental an acquisition as the first, was a terrifyingly well-behaved Doberman. Left alone with a roast on the table, Miata would not dream of leaving the blanket that was her bed. Now she cocked her head, ready to do whatever Tess instructed, even if it meant she had to give up licking the stuffed toy lamb, a replica of Shari Lewis’s Lamb Chop, she dragged with her everywhere.

  But, as always, the Doberman took no initiative. Miata was a born follower, a beta dog, maybe even an omega dog.

  “Road trip,” Tess declared. Being the boss had its privileges, even if her only subordinates were two canines, indifferent to her brilliant decision-making. She would head west, wrap up Frederick and Sharpsburg over two days, spending a night. It wasn’t that far—each was an easy day trip, no more than an hour’s drive—but she saw no reason to travel the same roads twice. Esskay could go, but Miata would have to stay home with Crow. The backseat of the Toyota simply could not accommodate 160 pounds of dog, not when 70 pounds of it—Esskay—insisted on complete horizontal domination.

  Frederick is where the soft dark shape of the Appalachians first appears on the horizon, where the road opens up and hints at the vast-ness of the country beyond. Tess had never liked this expansive view. In her mind, Frederick was nothing more than the hometown of Barbara Fritchie, the little old lady who allegedly stood up to Stonewall Jackson, flying the U.S. flag as Confederate troops marched north toward Gettysburg. The highway into town had been lined once with reminders to visit Barbara Fritchie’s candy shop and Barbara Fritchie’s souvenir shop and Barbara Fritchie’s café. The signs were gone now, but John Greenleaf Whittier’s lines were burned into Tess’s memory. She wondered if the poem was still taught.

  “Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,/But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

  Had she really said that? Probably not, Tess decided. At any rate, the township that Fritchie had so vigorously preserved for the Union was a sprawling exurb now. People were willing to drive more than an hour to jobs in Baltimore and D.C., in order to have a little more house and a little more land for a little less money. Talk about a deal with the devil.

  Tiffani Gunts had lived outside Frederick, in a warren of new town houses not far from the Monocacy River. Tiffani Gunts had died there too. Six years ago, shot by an apparent intruder. Frederick had a decent daily newspaper, so Tess had been able to find out a little more about the young woman, only twenty-two when she died. A student at the local community college, she worked part-time at a convenience store. She was living with her fiancé, Eric Shivers, and her three-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. Shivers had been out of town on a business trip when someone broke into the town house. Tiffani must have surprised the thief, for he shot her to death in the kitchen.

  Eric Shivers didn’t turn up in any of the telephone databases that Tess searched, but the Guntses were easy to find. There were only two listed in the Frederick phone book, Tiffani’s parents and an older brother and his wife. The senior Guntses lived in an older part of Frederick. Not the nice-old part, which had dark red-brick houses and broad front porches that dated back to the Barbara Fritchie era. Wallace and Betty Gunts lived in the sad-old part, a neighborhood of tired-looking ranch houses. Forty years ago, this area must have held the promise of better times, but that promise had been broken long ago. Worn down was the phrase that occurred to Tess as she turned down their street—for the neighborhood, for the house, and for the Gunts family too, once she met them. The quartet—Mr. and Mrs. Gunts Sr., Mr. and Mrs. Gunts Jr.—had pale, dull skin and flat eyes. They looked as if they had been rubbed so hard by life they didn’t have any pores left.

  The Guntses took her to the family room, an extension built off the back of the house. The beige wall-to-wall carpet crunched beneath Tess’s feet, and there was a c
urious fist-size hole in the drywall, as if someone had punched it one day, but the room was otherwise neat and clean. Wally Jr. was the apparent spokesman. His father was almost catatonic in his stony silence. The two women kept their eyes fixed on the sliding glass door to the backyard, where three children played in the not-quite-warm April air. One of those must be Tiffani’s child, but Tess wasn’t sure if she lived here or with her aunt and uncle.

  “I’m sorry to ask you to dredge up unpleasant memories,” Tess said, “but there is a possibility it could do some good.”

  She had seldom made this claim before in her work, at least not honestly.

  “We were glad you called,” Wally Jr. said. “We never felt like the sheriff’s office did all they could. They were nice enough, but every time we asked about this thing or that thing, they’d tell us we watched too much television. The investigator did tell us he was going to give the case a special kind of number, see if it matched similar cases in other states.”

  “A VICAP number?”

  Wally clearly didn’t know, but he wanted to be helpful. “That sounds right.”

  “But they didn’t find anything.”

  “Not that they ever told us. Fact is, all I know they did for certain was call pawnshops, looking for Tiffani’s engagement ring, or the microwave and the blender. Eric was so organized, he even had the warranties on the electric stuff, so they could have ID’d it if it turned up. But like I kept telling ‘em, the guy’s not going to pawn anything here in Frederick. You’d think they were scared to make a long-distance call.”

  Tess decided to play devil’s advocate. “Investigators are usually pretty determined to solve homicides.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. But it was kind of like they thought they did solve it, just because they had a theory. They were sure some guys came up I-270 from Washington and decided to break into the town houses because they were new then, and not all were occupied. A brand-new refrigerator and stove had been stolen from one of the empty units two weeks earlier. The lock was jimmied in the same way. But nothing big was stolen from Tiffani’s place. Because Tiffani was—Tiffani was—”

  Wally Jr.“s face reddened as he tried to suppress the tears that brimmed in his dull brown eyes. His mother and his wife didn’t bother to fight them, they just sat with tears coursing down their flat, pale faces. Only the father remained impassive. Six years, Tess thought. Does this kind of pain ever end? Would it be different if their daughter’s killer had been caught and convicted?

  “I know what happened.” Shot to death in the kitchen, as her child slept upstairs. “Guy used a pry on the lock, and it gave way pretty easy.”

  “The bottom lock, yeah. I don’t know why Tiffani didn’t have the dead bolt on, Eric being on the road and all. She wasn’t as timid as she once was, but she still wouldn’t have gone downstairs if she thought a burglar was in the house.”

  “What would she have done?”

  “She’d have grabbed the portable phone and locked herself in the baby’s room. She was a smart girl. She would have done the smart thing. I’m telling you, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Is there any possibility it wasn’t an intruder? Do you think the investigation should have focused on a different scenario, or someone else in Tiffani’s life, such as her daughter’s father?”

  Wally looked puzzled. “No, I think they’re probably right about what happened, but I don’t understand why they can’t find the guy. When they really want to solve a crime, they always do. Ever notice that? If you kill a rich person, they get you. Cops come to your house and take footprints and tire tracks and use that weird stuff that makes even tiny traces of blood shine. I know. I watch the Discovery Channel. But some lowlife shoots a twenty-two-year-old woman who never hurt anyone, whose life was just getting good after being bad for so long…” Wally Jr.“s voice thinned out, taking on a telltale nasal quality. He was trying so hard not to break down.

  “Why had Tiffani’s life been bad?”

  “Oh.” Wally Jr. exchanged looks with the two women. “The usual. Ran with a bad crowd in high school, got pregnant, had to drop out. Bum boyfriend.”

  “Eric Shivers?”

  “Oh, not Eric.” Wally’s wife, a Katherine who went by Kat, spoke for the first time. “Eric was great. Eric was the best thing that ever happened to her. No, the boyfriend before, Troy Plunkett. Older guy. He was mean, just rotten. Got Tiffani pregnant, said it wasn’t his, fought the support for two years. Then the DNA come back, and it said Darby was his. He still didn’t pay. Said he didn’t have any money.”

  Tiffani Gunts. Darby Plunkett. It occurred to Tess that the more people fought their hard, unglamorous surnames, the more they called attention to them.

  “Did the sheriff’s department consider Darby’s father a possible suspect?”

  Wally Jr. took back the role of spokesman. “They asked us questions, same as you. Troy is an SOB. But he had actually calmed down some when he heard Tiffani was going to get married. He thought it meant he wouldn’t have to pay support.”

  Tess knew something about child support laws. Tracking deadbeat dads and searching their assets was one of her sidelines. “Did he find out he was wrong?”

  “Yeah, Tiffani told him a week or two before—” He stopped, not wanting to define the date. “It wouldn’t have mattered. He didn’t pay it when she was on her own, he didn’t pay it when she moved in with Eric, he doesn’t pay to this day, and he’s all that little girl has in the world. He gets a job, we get a garnishment order, he quits and finds some cash job that doesn’t show up on the books.”

  “Who’s raising Darby?”

  “We are.” It was the first time Tess had heard the voice of Betty Gunts, who had merely nodded when they were introduced. “I take care of Kat’s two while she works, so it makes sense for Darby to stay here with me. She’s a good girl.”

  “Which one is she?” Tess asked, looking out the sliding glass doors.

  “You can’t talk to her,” Wally Jr. said, swift as a cat. “She was only three, she never saw or heard anything. She was still sleeping the next morning, when a guy from the town house two doors up from Eric and Tiffani’s saw the back door standing open.”

  “She slept through a gunshot?”

  “They think the guy used a silencer.”

  “A man who was stealing appliances from town houses he assumed were empty used a silencer?”

  Wally Jr. shrugged. Discovery Channel or no, the detail didn’t seem odd to him.

  “And Eric Shivers? What happened to him?”

  The brother looked at his parents, as if he now needed permission to speak.

  “Oh, that was sad,” Kat murmured. “Just so sad.”

  “Eric was really good to Tiffani,” Wally said. “We all liked him a lot. He convinced her to go back to school part-time, study to be something. They were going to get married after she graduated. He paid all the bills, he was nice as he could be. And he was like a father to Darby.

  But he wasn’t blood. When Tiffani died, Darby had to be with family. If my parents hadn’t taken her, Troy Plunkett might have petitioned to get her, and we couldn’t have that. Eric understood. But it was hard on him. He lost Tiffani and Darby.“

  “He got awful thin,” Mrs. Gunts said. “And he tried to keep seeing the girl, to stay connected to her, but I think that made it worse. She looks just like her mother.”

  There was a photograph of Tiffani Gunts, one of those blue-background school portraits, on the far wall of the family room. Tiffani had masses of dark hair, dark eyes, and tiny features. It all added up to a baby-deer delicacy that was almost as good as pretty. Her smile was shy and tentative, but she didn’t look defeated, beaten down by life. Then again, she was young in the photograph, a mere teenager.

  And she had the advantage of not having to live with the pain of her own murder.

  Tess glanced at the three children in the backyard. All three had dark hair and dark eyes. She guessed Darby was the middle one, but on
ly because the other girl looked too young, more like five, and the tallest was a boy. The resemblance didn’t seem as striking to her, but then Tiffani had not been her daughter, her sister.

  “What happened to Eric?”

  The subject of Eric Shivers was one the sister-in-law seemed to relish. “He moved south. Georgia?”

  “North Carolina,” Mrs. Gunts said. “He sent us Christmas cards. For a while.”

  “He was good-looking,” Kat said, glancing at her husband. “Better-looking than Troy, I mean. I was happy for Tiffani.”

  “And where was Eric the night that Tiffani was killed?”

  Wally Jr. answered. “On the road, in Spartina, Virginia. He traveled all the time. He was a salesman, sold supplies to those mall camera shops. Police called him and asked him to come back and identify—to identify—”

  Tess tried to distract him from his own memories. “Was it generally known that Tiffani was home alone a lot?”

  Wally’s eyes seemed to brighten. “Do you think—?”

  “I’m not thinking anything,” Tess said carefully. Back in Baltimore, this assignment had seemed theoretical and bloodless, more public policy than detective work. She had not anticipated how difficult it would be for the families to relive these memories. “But I am curious about Troy Plunkett.”

  Wallace Gunts Sr. spoke at last. He had a voice like a rusty gate. “He’s mean enough to kill. He’s just not smart enough to get away with it.”

  “Is Troy Plunkett still around?”

  But Wallace Sr. was done. He reminded Tess of that famous flower in England, the one that bloomed for only a day and gave off a noxious stink when it did.